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There Was a Country
Chinua Achebe
  • Published: 21 August 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241959206
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

There Was a Country

A Personal History of Biafra

Formats & editions
EBook
24 Oct 2012
Paperback
21 Aug 2013
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Chinua Achebe's last book: a personal and impassioned memoir - recalling one of Nigeria's most tragic civil wars

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe's life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War. For more than forty years Achebe was silent on those terrible years, until he produced this towering reckoning with one of modern Africa's most fateful events. A marriage of history, remembrance, poetry and vivid first-hand observation, There Was a Country is a work of wisdom and compassion from one of the great voices of our age.
  • Published: 21 August 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241959206
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

About the author

Chinua Achebe

Born in 1930, Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe is probably black Africa's most widely read novelist. His first work, Things Fall Apart, is regarded as a classic of world literature and has been translated into 40 languages.

Introducer Biography:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria and now lives in the United States. She is the author of Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sunand The Thing Around Your Neck.

CA

Also by Chinua Achebe

Africa's Tarnished Name
The Education of a British-Protected Child
An Image Of Africa/ The Trouble With Nigeria
African Trilogy, The: Things Fall Apart No Longer at Ease Arrow of God,
Arrow of God
No Longer at Ease
A Man of the People
See all

Praise for There Was a Country

It has the tense narrative grip of the best fiction. It is also a revelatory entry into the intimate character of the writer's brilliant mind and bold spirit. Achebe has created here a new genre of literature

Nadine Gordimer

Engrossing ... an elegy from a master storyteller who has witnessed the undulating fortunes of a nation ... his strongest expressions are his poems, scattered between chapters, offering affecting interludes

Noo Saro-Wiwa, Guardian

Matchless ... what a man; what a life

Giles Foden, Daily Telegraph

Part-history, part-memoir, [Achebe's] moving account of the war is laced with anger, but there is also an abiding tone of regret for what Nigeria might have been without conflict and mismanagement

Sunday Times

A blend of historical overview, personal memoir and political manifesto ... fascinating

Evening Standard